Wednesday, August 07, 2013

PyDev: poll about minimum Java/Eclipse versions to support

Ok, one issue that has been brought up a few times in the last month was the reasons for supporting older versions of Java and Eclipse in PyDev...

Java 7 has been around for a while already (and Java 6 EOL was about a year ago), so, I'm considering making newer versions of PyDev compatible with Java 7 and dropping support for older versions. If there are use cases where people that can't upgrade, I'd like to know about those.

Also, the latest PyDev can support up to Eclipse 3.2 (although some features might not be available if they were introduced on later versions of Eclipse, the reason for this was that Aptana Studio 2 was built on that version, but it's also no longer active, so, this may be a bad reason at this time) -- note that right now the codebase needs to be compiled with the latest Eclipse version, but in runtime it can support older versions of Eclipse.

So, I'm considering supporting only Eclipse 3.8 and 4.3, but I'd also like feedback to check if there are scenarios where this can be a problem...

17 comments:

Andreas Pakulat
said...

We're still supporting MacOSX back to 10.4 with our PyDev-using IDE. We may drop 10.4 and require 10.5 in the near future. Java 1.7 is not available for that platform. On other platforms we ship the JRE ourselves so thats less of a concern.

The Eclipse requirement is less of an issue to us I think. Eclipse 3.8 didn't seem to be giving us anything important so far, but as long as thats supported we could use that. 4.2 and 4.3 do not seem to give us enough incentive at the moment to base our IDE on it.

All that being said, we're fine with sticking to PyDev 2.8 for now and then reconsider the Java and Eclipse situation once we see something in PyDev we really need.

Please ignore Java 6. Nobody should use it on Windows since security fixes are not available any more (or only for Oracle customers).

Regarding Eclipse, supporting only the latest version can be a problem when other plugins are not yet compatible with a new version. Personally, supporting only Eclipse 4.3+ would be ok for me, though.